The BJP’s Jammu and Kashmir president Sat Pal Sharma was among the candidates the party announced on Sunday for three of the four vacant Rajya Sabha seats from J&K. The election to the seats will be held on October 24. Sharma will contest one of the seats vacated by Ghulam Nabi Azad and Nazir Ahmed Laway in 2021. The other BJP candidates are Dr Ali Mohammad Mir and Rakesh Mahajan, who will contest the Rajya Sabha vacancies that opened up after the terms of Mir Mohammad Fayaz and Shamsher Singh Manhas expired. Sharma, a former minister in the BJP-PDP coalition government, has also served as J&K party president from 2015 to 2018. Rakesh Mahajan is the vice-president of the BJP’s J&K unit and an experienced organiser in the party. Ali Mohammad Mir was a BJP candidate who lost the 2024 Assembly election from the Khan Sahib constituency in Kashmir. Mir and Mahajan will be contesting the first two seats for which elections will be held separately in view of two separate notifications issued by the Election Commission. These two seats are, however, expected to go to J&K’s ruling National Conference, which has, along with its allies, a combined strength of 53 MLAs for each vacancy against the BJP’s 28. In the two other seats, the National Conference and the BJP have decided to contest one each, which means that if the Congress decides to stay away from the contest, both the NC and BJP will get one seat each, and Sat Pal Sharma could be elected to Rajya Sabha. The NC has decided to contest only three Rajya Sabha seats from the Union Territory and has said that it was keeping one seat open amid talks with ally Congress. If Congress joins the fray for one of the two seats, it could lead to a keen contest with the BJP. In that event, the votes of the non-BJP Opposition bloc comprising the PDP (3), AAP (1), People’s Conference (1) and two Independents, will be crucial. Of them, the AAP’s sole legislator, Mehraj Malik, is jailed and will need court permission to be allowed to vote. The PDP’s three MLAs and the Independents, Khursheed Ahmed Sheikh (Langate) and Shabir Ahmad Kullay (Shopian), are unlikely to back the BJP due to popular sentiment in their political constituencies in Kashmir. Since even an abstention may send the wrong signal, they could support the NC-led coalition. There are, however, five nominated MLA seats in the J&K Assembly that are to be filled Lt Governor Manoj Sinha. Senior Congress leader Naresh Gupta has said that since the Election Commission has notified the Rajya Sabha elections, it would be improper for the LG to nominate the MLAs at this point.
